The Fed added $11 billion to its SOMA account for the week ending yesterday. It purchased $11 billion in mortgage securities directly from banks. This injects $11 billion into the banking system. Cash is “high powered” money, meaning it can be leveraged 10x (banks need to hold 10% in reserves against “high powered” money. $11 billion is $110 billion of leverage for the banks to use for activities such as propping up the stock market.

This certainly explains why there appears to be another “V” recovery in the stock market after a near-10% drawdown in the Dow and the SPX. This is very similar to the 10% market plunges in August 2015 and January 2016, both of which were followed with highly unusual “V” recoveries.

This is also likely the catalyst that powered gold’s $41 rise since February 9th.

Clearly the Federal Reserve – not withstanding the fecal odor that emanates from Fed officials’ mouths when they speak – has an implicit monetary policy that targets the stock prices.

Furthermore, the Fed must be getting worried about the housing market. Removing $11 billion in mortgage securities from the banking system and replacing those securities with cash was likely a move targeting the rate spread between conventional mortgages and the 10-yr Treasury. Mortgage purchase applications plunged 6% last week. This was without question in response to mortgage rates pushed meaningfully higher by the rising 10yr Treasury yield and the widening of spreads associated with higher volatility in the markets.

I remain highly skeptical that the Fed will actually follow-through with its stated plan to raise monthly its balance sheet reduction to $30 billion this year. In fact, the Fed has yet to disclose a definitive schedule for said balance sheet reduction. I’m taking wagers that we do not see this occur.

On February 6 PCR asked if the Plunge Protection Team had stepped in and prevented a stock market correction by purchasing equity index futures. https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/02/06/another-arrested-equity-correction-paul-craig-roberts/ Sure enough, the daily exchange volume chart shows an increase in futures activity on February 2 with sharp increases on Feb. 5th and 6th. Those are the days when the stock market averages were experiencing large point drops. So, ask yourself, would you purchase equity futures while experiencing cumultive stock market drops? One can understand shorting a dropping market, but not buying futures.

Unless this is what happened. Seeing the beginning of a correction, the Plunge Protection Team placed a futures bid just below the existing price. Traders saw the bid, recognized that the government was intervening to support the market, and the bid was front-run with the hedge fund algorithms automatically picking up the action.

Who but the Federal Reserve with its unlimited ability to create money would take the risk of buying futures in the face of a falling market. Moreover, such an infusion of money into the market does not show up in the money supply figures.

The futures purchases prevented margin calls and stop/loss orders in a heavily leveraged equity market that would have collapsed the market.

What are the pros and cons of this kind of intervention (which might have occurred also in May 2010 and August 2015)? By stopping a correction, the intervention prevented a pension fund collapse, both private and state. However, by propping up over-valued equities that the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing created, the intervention rewarded over-leveraged speculative risk-taking and prevented price discovery. We still have an equity market whose values rest on record margin debt, stock buy-backs, and prices pumped up by money-printing. The problems waiting to come home continue to build.

The Fed’s tightening plan sounds like my fat buddy’s diet plan at my workplace. He still scarfs down his usual 2 Big Macs a day (sometimes 3), but has lately taken to washing it down with a diet Coke instead of a regular Coke. “Gotta watch my weight”, he recently told me. – comment from “Marcus”

Sometimes I wonder if the Fed is just toying with the financial media and economic analysts. The Fed’s constant threat to raise rates and unwind its balance sheet seems to be taken seriously by most commentators. Even the few analysts I respect, like David Stockman, include the assumption the Fed will reduce its balance sheet by a few hundred billion per year.

And yet, nearly 5 years past Bernanke’s “taper speech” the Fed Funds rate has been barely lifted off the zero-bound and the Fed’s balance sheet has been reduced only ever so slightly. Every meeting it’s pretty much the same story: “FED LEAVES RATES UNCHANGED IN UNANIMOUS VOTE *FED: ECONOMY TO `WARRANT FURTHER GRADUAL INCREASES’ IN RATES” (the graphic to the right was hypothecated from an article tweeted by @RudyHavenstein – note the date of publication).

In today’s statement, the Fed comments that “inflation to stabilize around 2% medium-term.” First of all, what the hell does “medium-term” mean? And in what parallel universe is the Fed calculating its 2% inflation rate? Food prices are soaring; healthcare premiums rose anywhere from 20% to 100%; home prices allegedly are up at least 10%; energy prices are rising at a clip well beyond 2% per annum.

The Fed’s nefarious “Quantitative Tightening” has been a complete joke. The “weight loss” program was supposed to commence in October. On October 11th, the Fed’s balance sheet $4.221 billion. As of last Wednesday, the Fed’s balance sheet was $4.203 trillion – down $18 billion. The Fed is not even shedding its promised $10 billion per month. The SOMA account, which is where the disclosed bond purchases reside, is also about $18 billion lighter since mid-October. Note: “disclosed” as opposed to the off-balance sheet asset purchases held in off-shore accounts like the Swiss National Bank and the Belgian Central Bank. But the mortgage holdings in the SOMA account have actually increased $3 billion since mid-October. You can see for yourself here – SOMA account – and here – Fed Balance Sheet.

If the economy is doing so well and there’s a shortage of houses (allegedly) and a shortage of labor, why is the Fed adding to its mortgage holdings and why is the Fed – in a unanimous vote – leaving rates unchanged? “Economists” like Moody’s Mark Zandi assert that the labor market and economy is “in danger of over-heating.” If that’s the case, why are rates being held down at historically low levels? Why does the Fed threaten rate hikes but never follows-through? It’s the same story after every meeting. The market prices in a 95% chance of a rate-hike for the next meeting. And then, just like Lucy does to Charlie Brown with the football when he goes to kick it in “Peanuts,” the Fed folds the cards in its hand and waits for the next deal.

According to Goldman Sachs’ financial conditions index, it’s never been easier to get a loan. In fact, outstanding debt at every level of the economic system hits a new record pretty much daily. The Treasury Secretary is now begging Congress to raise the debt ceiling. The amount of Treasury debt outstanding will easily increase in excess of trillion dollars this year, as it has every year since 2007.

In truth, the economy is starting to fold faster than the Fed folds at every FOMC meeting. Credit card and auto loan defaults are beginning to soar. We’re at levels on both that were last seen in late 2008. The problem is, we have not had a crisis yet. The market, regardless of the unwillingness of the Fed to tighten its monetary policy, is starting to take care of that for the Fed. The yield on the 10yr Treasury has nearly doubled since July 2016. It’s up 60 basis points since August.

Mortgage rates, despite the Fed’s willingness to inject money into the mortgage market, are at 4-year highs. This is going to wreak havoc on the demand for homes. This is because most homebuyers buy a monthly payment, not a home. It won’t take much of a move higher in rates, combined with the changes in the new tax law, to make that monthly mortgage payment unaffordable for most prospective homebuyers.

What would happen to interest rates if the Fed actually followed through on its threats and began hike rates up to a level which reflected the rate of inflation and actually reduced its Treasury and mortgage holdings according to the schedule Yellen outlined last year?

The stock market rejoices the House passage of the tax “reform” Bill as the Dow shot up 187 points and the S&P 500 spiked up 21. The Nasdaq soared 1.3%, retracing its 3-day decline in one day. The tax bill is nothing more than a massive redirect of money flow from the Treasury Department to Corporate America and billionaires. The middle class will not receive any tax relief from the Bill but it will shoulder the burden of the several trillion dollars extra in Treasury debt that will be required to finance the tax cuts for the wealthy. The tax “reform” will have, at best, no effect on GDP. It will likely be detrimental to real economic output.

The Big Money Grab is “on” at the highest levels of of Wall St., DC, Corporate America, the Judiciary and State/local Govt. These people are grabbing from a dying carcass as fast and greedily as possible. The elitists are operating free from any fear of the Rule of Law. That particular nuisance does not apply to “them” – only to “us.” They don’t even try to hide their grand scale theft anymore because the protocol in place to prevent them from doing this is now on their side. This is the section in Atlas Shrugged leading up to the big implosion.

“When you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors–when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you–when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice–you may know that your society is doomed.” – Atlas Shrugged

Speaking of the economy, as with inflation the GDP report does not reflect the true level of real economic activity in the U.S. because the Government report is not designed to measure real economic output. Instead, the GDP is yet another Government economic report constructed with blatant statistical manipulation and outright fraudulent data sampling. How am I so certain of this? The “tell” on the true condition of the economy lies with the fact that Fed is “normalizing” neither interest rates nor its balance sheet. In fact, if the Fed were to “normalize” monetary policy, it would quickly hike the Fed funds rate up closer to 6% and it would be reducing its balance sheet and removing at least the $2.1 trillion in printed cash sitting in the banks’ excess reserve account. The problem is that this “normalization” would pop the enormous asset bubble created from money printing. It would also interrupt the ongoing wealth confiscation.

Elijah Johnson at Silver Doctors invited to discuss the above issues as well as the stock, bond and housing bubbles. And of course gold and mining stocks:

I’ll be releasing the latest issue of my Mining Stock Journal this evening. It will have an emerging junior gold exploration company that has been described at “Gold Standard Ventures 2.0.” You can find out more information here: Mining Stock Journal info.

The Fed often treats financial markets as a beast to be tamed, a cub to be coddled, or a market to be manipulated. It appears in thrall to financial markets, and financial markets are in thrall to the Fed, but only one will get the last word. – Former FOMC member, Kevin Warsh – The Fed Needs New Thinking

Please note, a large portion of the source links, plus the idea for this commentary, were sourced from GATA’s latest dispatch regarding the possible appointment of Warsh as the next Fed Chairman.

The quote above is from former FOMC board member, Kevin Warsh, who appears to be Trump’s top candidate to assume the Fed’s mantle of manipulation from Janet Yellen. By way of relevant reference, Warsh happens to be the son-in-law of Ronald Lauder, who is a good friend of Trump’s. He is also a former Steering Committee member of the Bilderberg Group. GATA has published a summary reprise of direct evidence from previous written admissions by Warsh the the Fed actively manages financial asset prices, “including bolstering the share price of public companies” (from link above).

In addition to stocks, Warsh admitted in the same essay that, “The Fed seeks to fix interest rates and control foreign-exchange rates simultaneously” (same link above). This task is impossible without suppressing the price of gold, something which began in earnest in 1974 when, under the direction of then Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, paper gold futures contracts were introduced to the U.S. capital markets. This memo, written by the Deputy assistant Secretary of State for International Finance and Development, was sent to Kissinger and Paul Volcker in March 1974: Gold and the Monetary System: Potential U.S.-EC Conflict (note: the source-link is from GATA – it was discovered in the State Department archives by Goldmoney’s John Butler).

The nature of discussions after that memo, the minutes of which are now publicly available, center around the fact that several European Governments were interested in re-introducing gold into the global monetary system. This movement was in direct conflict with the interests of U.S. elitists and banking aristocrats, as U.S. had successfully established the petro-dollar as the reserve currency.

In 2009 GATA sent a Freedom Of Information Act request to the Fed in an attempt to get access to documents involving the Fed’s use of gold swaps (this letter written by Warsh confirms the existence of the use of gold swaps). Warsh, who was the FOMC’s “liaison” between the Fed and Wall Street, wrote a letter back to GATA denying the request.

The fact that Warsh has openly acknowledged that the Fed manipulates assets, including an implicit admission that the Fed seeks to suppress the price of gold, might give some in the gold community some hope that Warsh, if appointed to the Chair of the Fed, might reign in the Fed’s over interference in the financial markets.

On the contrary, I believe this makes him a bigger threat to democracy, capitalism and freedom than any of his recent predecessors. Warsh is better “pedigree’d” and politically connected than either Bernanke or Yellen. His high level involvement in the Bilderberg Group ties him directly to the individual aristocrats who are considered to be the most financially and politically powerful in the western world. Without a doubt he has far more profound understanding of the significance of gold as a monetary asset than any modern Federal Reserve FOMC member except, perhaps, Alan Greenspan.

The good news for the gold investing community is that it becomes increasingly evident that China, together with Russia and several other eastern bloc countries, is working to remove the dollar as the reserve currency and reintroduce gold into the global monetary system. A contact and subscriber to my Mining Stock Journal who happens to live and work in Shanghai has sent further evidence (and here) that China is working toward launching a gold-backed yuan oil futures contract.

This will be a complete game-changer. It’s also likely why the western Central Banks have doubled their efforts to keep the price of suppressed over the last 6 weeks. My contact believes there’s a possibility that the contract will be rolled out after Xi is “re-elected” toward the end of October (the Party Congress convenes after the week-long National Holiday observance).

My personal view is that China will work more gradually to roll out a futures contract that effectively “disconnects” the petro-dollar and the dollar’s reserve status in order to minimize the adverse, albeit temporary, consequences of this. The first iteration could be a simple yuan-denominated contract to get the system working. The foremost consequence of this, of course, will be the massive transfer of wealth and power from the United States and its European vassal countries to the emerging global power in the eastern hemisphere.

Dave, just a moment for some feed back on your Short Seller’s Journal. I just placed an order for 1oz gold eagles thx to my profits off Tesla and BBBY, thx as always. – subscriber email received today –Short Seller’s Journal information

Wow. The hedge funds are almost net short silver contracts again, having had their algos steered into that predicament by the bullion bank market manipulation. The fraudulent paper short position in both gold and silver – but especially silver – is many multiples larger than the available supply of physical metal that is supposed to legally back commodity derivatives. This is evident from the Comex disclosures.

We have no idea what the total net short position would be including LBMA forward contracts and OTC derivatives. That the entities who are paid by the public to prevent this continue to allow and enable this massive fraud is a tragic commentary on the current U.S. economic, financial and political systems.

Craig “Turd Ferguson” Hemke invited me onto his weekly subscriber podcast show to discuss the trading action in gold and silver, the catastrophe otherwise known as the Federal Reserve and the slow-motion train wreck occurring in the stock market:

The answer is debatable but it depends on, exactly, to which rates you are referring. The Fed has “raised,” more like “nudged,” the Fed Funds target rate about 50 basis points (one-half of one percent) this year. That is, the Fed’s “target rate” for the Fed Funds rate was raised slightly at the end of two of the four FOMC meetings this year from 50 to 75 basis points up to 1 – 1.25%. Wow.

But this is just one out of many interest rate benchmarks in the financial system. The 10-yr Treasury yield – which is a key funding benchmark for a wide range of credit instruments including mortgages, municipal and corporate bonds, has declined 30 basis points this year. Thus, for certain borrowers, the Fed has effectively lowered the cost of borrowing (I’m ignoring the “credit spread” effect, which is issuer-specific).

Moreover, the spread between the 1-month Treasury Bill and the 10-yr Treasury has declined this year from 193 basis points to 125 basis points – a 68 basis point drop in the cost funding for borrowers who have access to the highly “engineered” derivative products that enable these borrowers to take advantage the shape of the yield curve in order to lower their cost of borrowing:

In the graph above, the top blue line is the yield on the 10-yr Treasury bond and the bottom line is the rate on the 1-month T-bill. As you can see the spread between the two has narrowed considerably.

Thus, I would place the news reports that the Fed has “raised in rates” in the category of “Propaganda,” if not outright “Fake News.”

One has to wonder if the Fed’s motives in orchestrating that graph above are intentional. On the one hand it can make the superficial claim that it is raising rates for all the reasons stated in the vomit that is mistaken for words coming from Janet Yellen’s mouth; but on the other hand, effectively, the Fed has managed to lower interest rates for a widespread cohort of longer term borrowers.

Furthermore, this illusion of “tighter” monetary policy serves the purpose of supporting the idea of a strong dollar and enabling a highly orchestrated – albeit temporary – manipulated hit on the gold price using paper gold derivatives.

To borrow a term from Jim Sinclair, the idea that the Fed has “raised rates” is nothing more than propaganda for the primary purpose of “MOPE” – Management Of Perception Economics. On that count, I give the Fed an A+.

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Goldman Sachs’ net income declined 42% from 2009 to 2016. How many of you reading this were aware of that fact? Yet GS’ stock price closed today 36% above its 2009 year-end closing price. See below for details.

Auto sales in April declined again, with the Big Three domestic OEMs (GM, F and Chrysler) missing Wall St estimates by a country mile. The manipulated SAAR (seasonally adjusted annualize rate) metric put a thin layer of lipstick on the pig by showing a small gain in sales from March to April. But this is statistical sleight of hand. The year over year actuals for April don’t lie: GM -5.7%, F -7% and Chrysler -7.1%. What is unknown is to what extent the numbers reported as “sales” were nothing more than cars being shipped from OEM factory floors to dealer inventory, where it will sit waiting for an end-user to take down a big subprime loan in order to use the car until it gets repossessed.

The growth in loan origination to the key areas of the economy – real estate, general commercial business and the consumer – is plunging. This is due to lack of demand for new loans, not banks tightening credit. If anything, credit is getting “looser,” especially for mortgages. Since the Fed’s quantitative easing and near-zero interest rate policy took hold of yields, bank interest income – the spread on loans earned by banks (net interest margin) – has been historically low. Loan origination fees have been one of the primary drivers of bank cash flow and income generation. Those four graphs above show that the loan origination “punch bowl” is becoming empty.

HOWEVER, the Fed’s tiny interest rate hikes are not the culprit. Loan origination growth is dropping like rock off a cliff because consumers largely are “tapped out” of their capacity to assume more debt and, with corporate debt at all-time highs, business demand for loans is falling off quickly. The latter issue is being driven by a lack of new business expansion opportunities caused by a fall-off in consumer spending. If loan origination continues to fall off like this, and it likely will, bank earnings will plunge.

But it gets worse. As the economy falls further into a recession, banks will get hit with a double-whammy. Their interest and lending fee income will decline and, as businesses and consumers increasingly default on their loans, they will be forced to write-down the loans they hold on their balance sheet. 2008 all over again.

Because of this, I think Goldman Sachs (GS) makes a great short idea, although I don’t want to suggest timing strategies. It’s an idea that, in my view, you need to short a little at a time and add to it if the stock moves against you. I could also be a good “crash put” idea.

Goldman will be hit by a fall-off in loan demand and by a big drop in the fees from securitizing the loans it underwrites into asset-backed securities (ABS). In addition, GS facea an even bigger drop in the fees from structuring and selling OTC “hedge” derivatives to the buyers of Goldman-underwritten loans and ABS.

Goldman’s net interest income has declined over the last three years from $4.1 billion in 2014 to $2.6 billion in 2016. This is a 36.5% drop. To give you an idea of the degree to which bank net interest income has dropped since the “great financial crisis,” in its Fiscal Year 2009, Goldman’s net interest income was $7.4 billion. That’s a 64% drop over the time period. In FY 2009, Goldman’s net income was $12.2 billion. In 2016, GS’ net income was $7.1 billion, as 42% decline.

To give you an idea of how overvalued GS stock is right now, consider this: At the end of GS’ FY 2007, 6 months before the “great financial crisis” (i.e. the de facto banking system collapse), Goldman’s p/e ratio was 9.5x. At the end of its FY 2009, its p/e ratio was 6.9x. It’s current p/e ratio 13.5x. And the factors driving Goldman’s business model, other than Federal Reserve and Government support, are declining precipitously.

As for derivatives…On its 2016 10-K, Goldman is showing a “notional” amount of $41 trillion in derivatives in the footnotes to its financials. This represents the sum of the gross long and short derivative contracts for which Goldman has underwritten. Out of this amount, after netting longs, shorts and alleged hedges, Goldman includes the $53 billion in “net” derivatives exposure as part of its “financial instruments” on the asset side of its balance sheet. Goldman’s book value is $86 billion.

If Goldman and its accountants are wrong by just 1% on Goldman’s “net” derivatives exposure, Goldman’s net derivatives exposure would increase to $94 billion – enough to wipe out Goldman’s book value in a downside market accident (like 2008). If Goldman and its “quants” have mis-judged the risk exposure Goldman faces on the $41 trillion in gross notional amount of derivatives to which Goldman is involved by a factor of 10%, which is still below the degree to which GS underestimated its derivatives exposure in 2008, it’s lights out for Goldman and its shareholders.

Think about that for a moment. We saw how wrong hedge accounting was in 2008 when Goldman’s derivative exposure to just AIG was enough to wipe Goldman off the Wall Street map had the Government not bailed out the banks. I would bet any amount of money that Goldman’s internal risk managers and its accountants are off by significantly more than 1%. That 1% doesn’t even account for the “fudge” factor of each individual trading desk hiding positions or misrepresenting the value of hedges – BOTH crimes of which I witnessed personally when I was a bond trader in the 1990’s.

As you can see in the 1-yr daily graph above, GS stock hit an all-time high on March 1st and has dropped 12.5% since then. I marked what appears to be a possible “double top” formation. The graph just looks bearish and it appears Goldman’s stock is headed for its 200 dma (red line,$202 as of Friday). To save space, I didn’t show the RSI or MACD, both of which indicate that GS stock is technically oversold.

The analysis above is from the April 16th issue of IRD’s Short Seller’s Journal. I discussed shorting strategies using the stock plus I suggested a “crash put” play. To find out more about the Short Seller’s Journal, use this link:SSJ Subscription information. There’s no minimum subscription period commitment. Try it for a month and if you don’t think it’s worth it, you can cancel. Subscribers to the SSJ can subscribe to the Mining Stock Journal at half-price.

Bloomberg News admitted that it is aware of the Fed’s “hidden” mandate to control the price of gold when it published an article last Sunday titled, “Yellen Can’t Halt Trump Gold Rally That Funds Bet Against” – Bloomberg/Yellen/Gold.

That title, combined with the content of the article, implied that the journalists and editors at Bloomberg are aware that the Fed actively manipulates the price of gold. It’s hard to know if this admission was put forth intentionally or unwittingly. But the headline outright acknowledges that the Fed’s goal with respect to the price of gold is to prevent it from moving higher. The Fed’s current tool for this purpose is the “good cop/bad cop” routine played out on a daily basis between the Fed Governors who purport the need for more interest rate hikes and the Fed Heads who advocate waiting until the economy improves.

Lost in the smoke of Orwellian propaganda is the absurd notion that the two “rate hikes” were a mere quarter of a percentage point in magnitude. This can hardly be described as “raising interest rates.” It certainly is not even remotely close to the concept of “interest rate normalization,” whatever that is supposed to mean. In mid-2007, about a year before the financial system nearly collapsed, the Fed Funds rate was 5.25%. A little more than a year later it had been dropped to near zero.

If the financial analyst “Einsteins” define “rate normalization” as the 5.25% level in 2007, it will take about about 20 years using the speed of rate hikes by the Fed over the last two years. On the other hand, going back to 1954, which is as far back as the Fed’s database takes us for the Fed funds rate, the median level for the Fed Funds rate is somewhere around 7%. Is THAT level how one would define “normalized rates?” You can do the math on how long it would take thereby to achieve “normalized interest rates” if 7% is the goal.

Since mid-December 2016, when gold appears to have bottomed out from the manipulated price “correction” that began in August, gold has been trading in defiance of the Fed’s attempts at price control. Yesterday’s (Wednesday, Feb 22nd) trading action is point in case. Gold was slammed for about $9 right after the paper trading market on the Comex floored commenced. This is standard operating procedure. But about 5 1/2 hours later, when the Fed released the minutes from its last meeting, gold spiked up and reclaimed the full $9 price take-down. Today gold has soared another $16.

At the Shadow of Truth, we suspect both Yellen and the editorial staff at Bloomberg News are mumbling to themselves. In today’s episode, we discuss the trading action in gold and the potential more interest rate hikes this year:

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“Yellen Can’t Halt Trump Gold Rally That Funds Bet Against” – That was the headline in a Bloomberg news report that was released on Sunday afternoon. There’s a lot going on in that headline – none of it accurate except for the fact that gold is moving higher despite the efforts of western Central Banks to cap the price.

The basic premise of the report is that gold is moving higher in defiance of the Fed’s apparent move to raise interest rates. Reading through the report reveals even more misleading and completely false information than is conveyed by the headline. Here’s a link if you want to read the article: Bloomberg/Yellen/Gold.

The headline itself and the article content are both highly problematic, riddled with disinformation and completely inaccurate assertions. Anyone actually who might have read the article and trusted the content has been taken down to “ground zero” intellectually. Propaganda for the ignorant. I will be reviewing several ways in which the article content is inaccurate, if not intentionally fraudulent, in the upcoming issue of the Mining Stock Journal.

That said, the headline outright acknowledges that the Fed’s goal with respect to the price of gold is to prevent it from moving higher. The idea that Yellen “can’t halt” the rising price of gold implies that such intervention is part of the Fed’s mandate. It’s the first time I can recall in 16 years of researching, trading and investing in the precious metals market that the mainstream financial media, unwittingly or not, has acknowledged that the Federal Reserve attempts to intervene in the gold market.

If the implied message of the headline was inadvertent, it means that conversations with respect to the Fed and its role in preventing the price of gold from rising are actively occurring in meeting rooms and reporter “bullpens” at several financial media organizations, with orders from “above” to never publish the truth. Imagine if the Washington Post had withheld the news about Watergate…

Today’s action in gold exemplifies the tenor of the Bloomberg report. Almost as if “on cue,” in deference to Yellen’s attempt to “halt” the gold rally from yesterday, gold was slammed for $9 this morning. The reason generally attributed is “March rate hike hopes” LINK. I guess that’s all it takes. Yellen or some Fed clown exhales “rate hike on the table in March” and gold gets slammed by the trading computers.

Allegedly Germany has repatriated a large portion of its gold ahead of schedule (why it was supposed to take 7 years no one can explain). Notwithstanding whether or not the gold is actually sitting physically in a Bundesbank vault, the announcement of the early repatriation conveys a sense of urgency to do so. Furthermore, the eastern hemisphere countries are hoovering gold like there’s no tomorrow for fiat currency.

The Feds and the western Central Banks are exuding fear with respect to gold. The escalation in anti-gold propaganda reflects this sense of desperation, as do the shallow sell-offs followed by a move higher in paper gold that are initiated by LBMA and Comex paper traders after the Asian markets close for the day. The conclusion remains that all sell-offs in the gold market, like today’s, should be capitalized upon by adding to positions in physical gold and silver and in mining stocks.